Computer Projects

I didn't always find computers interesting, though I remember the fascination of our families first TRS-80 (without floppy drive, but with 16k of RAM), and the KayPro my Dad lugged to China and my brother was saddled with in college. Thanks to that very same brother of mine I received a Powerbook 170 as a Christmas gift from my whole family when I was in graduate school at SAIC -- right when I was at the zenith of my interest in antique technologies such as letterpress, wood-engraving, and carpentry.

So I was hooked, and now I work with computers all the time. I've even made a few things using computers, and they're listed here:

Icons

(for Mac OS X and OS 9).

PHP+antiword

PHP script to convert MS Word documents to plain text via the web.

DOCtor-text

A quick hack of Stone Design's opensource DOCtor, a drag-and-drop application for converting Word documents to postscript. More information and source-code for the original DOCtor at http://www.stone.com/DOCtor/ . The version listed here will also create text files, in addition to postscript -- both DOCtor and DOCtor-text use antiword at their core.

manybooks.net

I've always liked reading eBooks on my Palm, so when Project Gutenberg released 10,000 books on DVD I created a site to automatically convert them to a variety of formats on the fly -- it's also been a great way to learn about MySQL and PHP, site structure, CSS, and text-formats!